Earning Your Stripes

I'm pretty sure I was 24 when my wife and I decided we needed to end our run of apartment living and grow up, buy a house and have some kids. We had no cash and decided to take out a loan to rent a picket fence to go with it. When we first started house-shopping, I looked immediately at the lot size, imagining the dream yard from my Wyoming boyhood. We needed at least an acre of green grass so I could install a batting cage and a putting green. On the other three acres we'd raise horses and build a self-sustaining garden. I would prance each morning through the lush greenery with a piping hot cup of coffee and sing the praises of nature. Also, I would need to quadruple my meager living as an assistant golf professional with some street hooking and heroin sales to pay the lawn crew to keep up the illusion.

It was then, during a sweaty daydream about lawn bowling and Jarts with the neigbors, that she challenged my manhood for the only first time.
"We have to buy a condo, dumbass sweetie. Maintenance provided. You can't take care of grass," she said. And when she said it, she sounded like an old German Kindergarten teacher telling me (a math genius) that I couldn't recite Pi to 3000 digits.

"You...can't take care... of GRASS!"

It was sooooo true. I worked Monday through Friday at a sweet private golf course where my job was to show up at dawn and make people happy and better at golf until nightfall. Then on the weekends, my job was to show up 3 hours before dawn to get ready to make people happy and better at golf until two hours afer nightfall. On my days off, I had to play golf so that I didn't accidentally teach these people how to drink 3 gallons of coffee on their drive to work (my only other talent) by mistake. So in truth, I had no time to take care of a sweet, Wyoming-style 5-acre yard with a full baseball diamond in the middle. But I wouldn't relent. She struck a chord with me the way Nels Cline strikes a chord during this. It was hard hitting and real and it pissed me off undressed my vision of what I was supposed to be. That chord resonated until I'd owned a house for a couple of years, and tirelessly failed at upkeeping a lawn between the hours of 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. and finally decided to give up the golf business in order to keep on being a half decent member of my own family.

I soon gained a freedom I'd never before had which people referred to as "weekends".

They were strange to me. There were hours with which you could do things, like mow and sleep. You could also coach and ride bikes and go to movies and breath air. IT WAS STARTLING. But the flip side of every wheat penny is still Abe Lincoln...so I had to come to terms with who I really was. I was (and still am) a yellow and black-striped worker bee...to the core. Wow, so self indulgent. I work soooo hard.

I don't sit still very well, except during funerals and old episodes of The Benny Hill Show, so I had to keep moving. I became a fanatic at proving my wife wrong taking care of my grass. As small as it was, that little patch of chlorophyll was going to be the earth's greenest, lushest, most tropical piece of earth on earth.

But every August in Kansas City- when grass falls from the ocean into hell in 30 seconds- my yard would die. It would flourish in May and early June, then struggle mightily past the 4th of July, soaked in firecracker dust and barbeque sauce. Sadly, by the time Leo came to roar around the Zodiac, the Keefe yard looked eerily similar to the illustrated cover of The Grapes of Wrath.

I got better by buying chemicals and invested in watering (GENIUS!) the grass. Now, it's a decent patch of earth.

The point of my little story is proving her wrong the caring. I got my first job caring (about grass) when I was thirteen. My old man dragged me and our 1/2 horsepower mower down Oak Street on a Saturday morning and basically paid a few hungover elderly neighbors to let me shittily mow their grass. They gave me my Dad's money back and got a hackjob for their time. I reaped all the benefits ($12)

On the way to the grocery store riding in the back of my Mom's car, we'd pass one of my shitty yards with asymmetic lines in it and a dozen 6-inch mohawks of missed cuts and it would be neatly framed by yards on each side where the DAD OF THE YEAR that lived there had spent 3 hours hand clipping every stem for the big yard award show that never happened (but which he felt he won every Sunday morning as he pranced out to fetch his paper with a cup of coffee). My yards had that Pig Pen swirl around them. I needed to change.

But I didn't change. Not until I turned 40 and grew the hell up started mowing feverishly, five yards a week. That's what I do now. I get it right. I mow yards on my block on my day off and during non-committed weekend hours. I mow grass like Da Vinci painted flowers...hyperbolically and without my left ear.

And I do this almost for free and entirely to prove to my teenage son and wife that there is solitude and great joy in doing something with purpose. Sometimes, it takes an hour to get the pattern right and the edging takes another hour you could be spending watching Benny Hill Reruns playing X Box. But when you step back and admire the symmetry of a piece of earth you care for and love, you have something that other teenagers people don't have...

The $10 bill and sense of pride that comes from a summer job.

I love a fresh cut lawn, whether it's my own or not. I love the fact that symmetrical lines in your yard can make the chaos inside your head house seem normal.

Maybe, just maybe, I will pass this curse trait on to my son this summer as we begrudgingly heartily launch Keefe and Sons Lawn Care.

Don't try to hire us, though. We have just enough earth beneath our feet to perfect before we can really get to work.